Travelling through Dali with a leg of ham

Traditionally hand-cured ham hung outside a wooden house in Jianchuan county, Dali prefecture. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Like author Zhang Mei, I am fascinated by Chief Li, the ethnic Bai leader of the Stone Dragon Village. It's a tiny place, with about a thousand folks tucked into the mountains near Dali in Yunnan province.

Chief Li's position suggests he's a small-town bureaucrat, but as I read Zhang's new book, Travels Through Dali With a Leg of Ham, a different picture emerges. Chief Li sees himself in charge not of a place or its people, but its music. He tells Zhang, and clearly anyone else who asks, that he is known as the "Folk Music King".

Zhang is on a tour as literal as the title of her book: In the first chapter, she procures a leg of the traditionally hand-cured ham that she remembers from her childhood in Dali. Fifty pages and a few recipes later, she and three colleagues arrive in Jianchuan county eager to share the ham with local cheese makers, the "pickle lady" of Weishan, a Spanish chef at a Dali farm restaurant, and regionally known folksingers like Chief Li.

First, Chief Li yields the stage－the concrete yard of the government office－to energetic young singers and dancers of the village. But soon he fetches a colorful waistcoat and his guitar, and sings a song about love. "His vocal chords let loose," Zhang writes, "revealing a rich, gravelly voice imbued with sadness, wisdom and romance. The fa?ade of government formality disappears."